In article <E19Va8j-0001AW-00@schnucke.hafn.myfqdn.de>, Thomas Hafner wrote:
>
> Maybe I should rather search for a _substitute_ running under NetBSD
> than expecting the package to be ported to NetBSD?

It is also possible to add pkgsrc Makefiles for programs that you
need, or ask the pkgsrc people nicely.

> Do I have to look anywhere else? Or is there an adequate substitute
> for tob + afio?
> 
> In addition I'm missing: bbdb (The Insidious Big Brother Database) and
> dependent packages (for syncing with devices a.s.o.).

I suggest asking about these on tech-pkg.

>> I suggest trying out pkgsrc.  It's really quite good, in my opinion.
> 
> Ack, but if I'm interested in software, that doesn't exist for NetBSD
> but for Debian GNU/Linux? (I think, the latter one consist of nearly
> 10000 packages, which is probably more than NetBSD offers.)

Personally, all the programs I use are already in pkgsrc.  As I
mentioned above, pkgsrc is growing all the time, and the developers
are generally very friendly (just ignore Greg Woods).

> If I want to deinstall a package, is pkgsrc able to remove dependent
> stuff, like APT does?

As someone else pointed out, yes.  Though, strictly speaking, the
package database and associated utilities is not part of pkgsrc --
pkgsrc is just a nicely automated way of using them.

> Can pkgsrc handle dependencies from roles, like APT does? E.g. a
> package might depend from mail-transport-agent, which isn't an actual
> package, but something like a role, and any of the packages like exim,
> sendmail, postfix, qmail a.s.o. can play that role.

Not that I know of.  Again, you could ask about this on tech-pkg.
Though in this case, the base system includes two MTAs, sendmail and
postfix, so the package wouldn't have to worry about it.  :)

> Doesn't matter. It might be the beginning of an interesting discussion
> (not a flamewar, I hope).

No flames so far!

One nice thing about source-based systems like pkgsrc, as opposed to
using binary packages, is that you can easily tweak the configure args
to your liking, meaning that the default configure options don't have
to include *everything*.  As an example, I use fetchmail to poll the
MSexchange IMAP server at my job, so I want NTLM authentication
support in fetchmail.  It's not enabled by default (nor should it
be!), but a tweak to the CONFIGURE_ARGS variable and all is well.